Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday April 20, 2011 @04:49PM
from the walk-and-play dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Some students at Rice University were recently asked by Shriner's Hospital to build a rehabilitation tool that makes learning to walk entertaining and engaging. Teaching children with spina bifida, or cerebral palsy can be challenging but the game/balance board walkway helps the children develop their motor skills while giving them incentive to keep at it. It's a really cool application of game technology that actually helps people."

Nicely pegged. But as other discussions like this have shown, insurance companies are unwilling to pay for (cheaper) game systems if, by chance, it resulted in having fun or could be used for other purposes. This is why other video game systems have been rejected for medical purposes and nurses giving blow jobs to ED patients as well.

Here I was thinking that the wii balance board was designed as a souped-up version of a physical therapy device. Physical therapists have used simple balance boards for decades. It shouldn't take four years, people. Props to the Shriners for getting stuff done.

I love the job they've done. I have two kids, and I feel for those kids. What I find distressing is that society always seems amazed when you use game formats as a teaching aid. Nature built us that way; pups, not only our own, get rewarded for imitating gestures and abilities they'll need later in life, and they enjoy it too. Personally I am amazed that games aren't used more often, even in adult training. I can say that here in Italy is almost unheard of.

Motek Medical in Amsterdam has been doing this for year already, both with the Wii and with much more accurate hardware such as medical forceplates. Their systems are used for clinical research and rehabilitation, particularly balance training for lower limb amputees, in hospitals around the world. www.motekmedical.com

Bookmark this story, folks. Any time you hear someone talking about "innovation," this is what actual innovation looks like. Both Nintendo, for inventing new forms of input devs, and the enterprising people that found a use for that input device that was not indicated by its makers.

Innovation is simple. Turning off one's preconceptions to get to that point is hard. Turning off the usual legal battles that generally inhibit it, even harder.

Hey folks,
I'm a senior Mechanical Engineer at Rice, and actually good friends with the people who've spent a year on this project. Nobody involved or even acquainted with this project expected it to be groundbreaking, cutting-edge technology. As a couple posters have already stated, medical forceplates are already accepted devices in many hospitals.
When we were selecting our senior design projects back in September, we were given a 1-page intro to the background and expectations for each project. An ex